Why I Memorised Every Football Ground in the UK to Win at Sales
And why my SDR bootcamps start with curiosity and preparation—not a cold-call script.
Quick pop quiz. Who's our current Chancellor of the Exchequer? What's the current rate of VAT? What do FTSE and EBITDA stand for? What's the price of a barrel of oil? What's the definition of a Unicorn? Who's the richest person on the planet?
If you hesitated on more than one, we need to talk.
I ask SDRs these questions on the first morning of our three-day Sales Training Bootcamp. Most of them look at me like I've lost the plot. "Afsheen, I'm here to learn how to cold call, not do a pub quiz." Fair enough. But here's why it matters.
I've spent 19 years in sales. I've trained SDRs across a range of companies, and the pattern is always the same. The ones who go on to smash their numbers share three qualities: Attitude, Passion and Work Ethic.
Call them soft skills or poster slogans if you like, but they're the foundation everything else is built on. You can teach someone a script. You can teach objection handling and cadence. You cannot teach someone to care. But you can put them in a room where they pick up the phone, hear forty-nine “no’s” before lunch and find out whether they'll dial their fiftieth.
You've heard the old 80/20 rule. 80% of sales are made by 20% of salespeople.
In my experience, it holds. The 20% are rarely the smoothest talkers in the room. They bring genuine curiosity to every conversation, they prepare their hooks and they keep going when the rest of the team has left for the day. If you manage SDRs, you already know exactly who I'm describing.
So back to those questions.
I call it commercial savviness. Whether you're selling into CFOs, procurement leads or managing directors, you need to know their world as well as your product. What's happening in the economy, politics, sport and fashion. Which football team their CEO supports. That last one might sound silly, but it wins conversations. It builds the kind of rapport you’ll never get from a script.
When I was 19, in my first B2B sales role, my ICP was Sales Directors. I'd sit across from people twice my age at conferences, client dinners and, more often than not, our local, the Cross Keys! I needed an edge. So, I memorised every single Premiership and Championship football ground in the country. All of them. Capacity, nickname, the lot.
Because football always came up. And when you're a freshly graduated girl sitting opposite a seasoned decision-maker, and you casually name their team's ground while they're trying to catch you out over a glass of wine, something shifts. They stop seeing the junior rep and start seeing someone who does their homework. I won more than a few bottles of wine, and the odd bet in the pub. (Who's nicknamed the Bees in the Premier League? That one's personal. I'm a Brentford girl!).
That same instinct (know more than anyone expects you to, prepare harder than anyone asks) is what I bring to every bootcamp I run.
Here's where I lose patience with most sales training: it's theory. Someone stands at the front of a room, clicks through slides for eight hours, and a room full of SDRs slowly lose the will to live. Death by slideshows. I've sat through those sessions. I've watched talented people glaze over while being told how to sell instead of actually selling.
Our bootcamp works the other way round.
Three days of interactive exercises, all built around one principle: getting out of your comfort zone.
You rebuild your LinkedIn profile so it works as a shop window, not a CV. You write your own cold call script. Not reading mine. Writing yours. Then you deliver it out loud and get honest feedback.
You record a video note and learn what works before you send it to a prospect. You role-play objections until they stop making your stomach flip. You practise questioning techniques, and you run a full sales simulation in front of your peers with real-time feedback.
You eat the frog: the hardest, most uncomfortable task, first.
It's supposed to be uncomfortable. That's the whole point. Most reps give up after a couple of attempts, right when the prospect is starting to pay attention. The ones who push through, who treat every "no" as something to learn from, are the ones who book meetings. They're the SDRs that Sales Directors actually want on their team.
Every bootcamp I run starts from one belief: SDRs deserve better than a PDF and a pep talk: three days of live practice, honest feedback and skills they can use the Monday morning after they leave the room. If you're a Sales Director reading this, ask yourself: when was the last time your team wrote their own scripts, recorded their own outreach videos and practised handling objections out loud? If the answer is "not enough," call me.
If any of this rings true, drop me an email at:
or find me on LinkedIn at
I'd rather have a conversation than send you a brochure.
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